v2.54 - v2.6 May/June 2012

Kurt Lingohr
- August 08, 2014 23:57

Been a really busy upgrade cycle - here's what is new. Enjoy!

Cloud Platform

Avid web surfers know that everyone is talking about the 'Cloud' for network infrastructure. We're excited to announce that PoolCar now supports a cloud model, for customers who host on our servers. In other words, we can now host separate client databases tethered to the one application instance. Huh? This means for more rapid and consistent upgrade cycles for hosted customers.

All existing hosted customers will be migrated to the new cloud platform in due course.

Secure Mode (SSL)

For customers on the new cloud platform (those who are hosted on the *.poolcar.com domain name) can now enable Secure Mode (SSL). SSL is the encrypted mode denoted in your browser with a padlock icon.

Check In / Out

A new page has been created called "Key Master" for staff who hand out keys to booking holders. The page lists the bookings for the day with a button to click which indicates the driver has come to collect the keys and commence the journey. Similarly, when the driver returns there is a Check In button. Clicking this button asks for the ending Odometer value and 'completes' the booking.

Key Master is available from either the SysAdmin or Site Admin page. Site Admins are restricted to see only bookings for cars for which they are an administrator for.

The byproduct of this change is that if Key Master is used consistently then the booking system will know if the car has been taken out or not. This is huge!!

In future upgrades we will color code the booking calendar to show that the booking is out, and put in some logic so that if a car has not been taken out within X minutes of the booking commencement time, the booking will be automatically cancelled.

This also positions PoolCar for physical inventory signalling, such as GPS over cellular and RFID tags at boom gates. See why we said this is huge?

Site Admins & Driver Register

In its default configuration state, Site Admins can view the Driver Register for all registered drivers right across the organization. Recently a configuration setting was introduced to turn this visibility on or off (Sysadmin > App Settings). In this upgrade, we extend this privacy commitment a step further with a new application setting that obfuscates (nice word!) the driver licence number for Site Admins. (ob·fus·cate/ - Render obscure, unclear, or unintelligible).

So with this setting enabled, Site Admins will not see the entire driver licence number, instead they'll see 123XXXXXX89.

Site Admins & Approval Triggers

Now there is an additional Application Setting (Sysadmin > Application Settings) to enable/disable Campus Administrator access to the approval triggers. When enabled, CA's have a link on their menu page. Note that CA's can only add/edit approval triggers for vehicles to which they are an administrator for.

New Approval Trigger Type

'Recurring Booking' is a an approval trigger field. The list of possible fields is now:

Recurring Booking

Overnight Booking

Booking Duration

Sender of Booking Confirmation Emails

By default booking confirmation emails originate from the default system email address (set in Sysadmin > Application Settings, top of page). You now have a new Application Setting to send booking emails either from the default address, or the Primary Contact for the vehicle being booked. This is suited to organisations where the Primary Contact is to be visible as the sender of the booking confirmations.

This applies also for cancellation emails and approval trigger emails.

Send Welcome Email

When you create a new user account, there is now an additional tickbox to send a welcome email. Ticking this box will send an email to the newly created user account containing their username, password and how to login.

Bug Fixes

Support for browsers using 'WebKit' such as Apple Safari, iPad. Some pages would seem to 'hang' on saving or cancelling using webkit based browsers